AT&T to Take Over Time Warner

If you think that Net Neutrality officially ending this week, and this decision coming so soon are coincidence, you might be wrong, and might be right. Now that we are at the mercy of the big companies that will control internet access, this write-up at TechCrunch outlines our dystopian future on the internet. And it also puts forward that Netflix and Alphabet need to become ISPs fast in order to save us from our corporate overlords. Corp Overlords vs Tech Overlords...Fight!

One sad note though is how much the world of video is increasingly closed to startups. When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.

I honestly have no fucking clue why Google, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and any other big ones didn't all band together and lobby the SHIT out of this. They should have been throwing money at the wall like crazy ... Their stupidity of not doing so will make them pay the price htough looks like.

Whoa now hold your horses everyone. I'm sure there is a strictly consumer and quality of service focus at the heart of this acquisition. With the combined entrenched law-protected infrastructure owned by these two I'm sure prices will come down and bandwidth increased across the board. Markets with no other provider options will benefit the most, somehow. No need to worry.

Whoa now hold your horses everyone. I'm sure there is a strictly consumer and quality of service focus at the heart of this acquisition. With the combined entrenched law-protected infrastructure owned by these two I'm sure prices will come down and bandwidth increased across the board. Markets with no other provider options will benefit the most, somehow. No need to worry.

Man, I love that ISP's can now do whatever they want. They really have shown in the past how trustworthy and nice and service orientated they are. Ajit Pai is NOT a paid piece of shit. Nope, not at all. NN needed to die because it wasn't exactly PERFECT. Getting rid of it completely and letting the ISP's control everything clearly is the way to do things.

I cannot believe this got approved. ISP business is going to shit. There was not enough competition as it was and this just reduces it more.

I guess AT&T is going to end up being the only ISP in the U.S. before long. No reason to think they would be stopped from buying all the others.

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Time Warner and Time Warner Cable aren't the same company. They split a while back, and Time Warner Cable has since been bought by Charter, which retired the Time Warner Cable brand. Time Warner is just a media (content) company, not an ISP. That is why this is considered a "vertical" merger. It wouldn't be if they were both ISPs, that would be a "horizontal" merger.

This might be a big merger and everyone is scared but the truth is tech will trump these guys. They have a gazzilion miles of coaxial. No, they are not winning any war with that stuff.

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And what magical amazing corporation in your dream world is going to magically create all this wireless technology and allow the people of America to not have tiny data caps? Slow speed and shitty service? Affordable pricing.

Sure, wireless itself might be the internet of the future, but that internet is still attached to fucking greedy corrupt piece of shit companies.

Net neutrality is still alive in many places, such as California, and California has more people in it than many major countries, so it's not like they can just ignore it.

Time Warner and Time Warner Cable aren't the same company. They split a while back, and Time Warner Cable has since been bought by Charter, which retired the Time Warner Cable brand. Time Warner is just a media (content) company, not an ISP. That is why this is considered a "vertical" merger. It wouldn't be if they were both ISPs, that would be a "horizontal" merger.

Net neutrality is still alive in many places, such as California, and California has more people in it than many major countries, so it's not like they can just ignore it.

Time Warner and Time Warner Cable aren't the same company. They split a while back, and Time Warner Cable has since been bought by Charter, which retired the Time Warner Cable brand. Time Warner is just a media (content) company, not an ISP. That is why this is considered a "vertical" merger. It wouldn't be if they were both ISPs, that would be a "horizontal" merger.

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Hush with all those facts....this is just awful, haven't you heard? This is a time for FUD and paranoia because muh Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality was barely around 2 years but people act like we're going to go back to the stone age since it's been repealed.

Hardline ISP's will soon be a thing of the past especially with 5G around the corner. Most people nowadays get their internet from wireless companies and that sector is ravenously competitive. Let AT&T try to slow down Netlifx. Sprint and/or T-Mobile won't and people will go flocking to them. Just like with when everybody got rid of unlimited data plans. T-Mobile started offering one, then Sprint followed suit and now they all do.

Let us not forget, AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011 but the FCC stopped it. That was BEFORE net neutrality.

Net neutrality is still alive in many places, such as California, and California has more people in it than many major countries, so it's not like they can just ignore it.

Time Warner and Time Warner Cable aren't the same company. They split a while back, and Time Warner Cable has since been bought by Charter, which retired the Time Warner Cable brand. Time Warner is just a media (content) company, not an ISP. That is why this is considered a "vertical" merger. It wouldn't be if they were both ISPs, that would be a "horizontal" merger.

I honestly have no fucking clue why Google, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and any other big ones didn't all band together and lobby the SHIT out of this. They should have been throwing money at the wall like crazy ... Their stupidity of not doing so will make them pay the price htough looks like.

I honestly have no fucking clue why Google, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and any other big ones didn't all band together and lobby the SHIT out of this. They should have been throwing money at the wall like crazy ... Their stupidity of not doing so will make them pay the price htough looks like.

No, all the companies merging would be bad....that's why it is illegal. Was illegal before NN and it's illegal after NN.

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These laws haven't be enforced since Clinton decided to allow merger mania in the 90's to fuel the stock market bubble and keep his favorability rating high. Healthy competition is good for the economy and bad for the stock market. Somehow people get confused those are not the same.

Found this article on the merger. I didn't verify all of their holdings. I thought it was interesting that AT&T would now have all the Time Warner stuff and DirecTV. That seems odd to me. I don't watch TV so whatever.

Whoa now hold your horses everyone. I'm sure there is a strictly consumer and quality of service focus at the heart of this acquisition. With the combined entrenched law-protected infrastructure owned by these two I'm sure prices will come down and bandwidth increased across the board. Markets with no other provider options will benefit the most, somehow. No need to worry.

Hush with all those facts....this is just awful, haven't you heard? This is a time for FUD and paranoia because muh Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality was barely around 2 years but people act like we're going to go back to the stone age since it's been repealed.

Hardline ISP's will soon be a thing of the past especially with 5G around the corner. Most people nowadays get their internet from wireless companies and that sector is ravenously competitive. Let AT&T try to slow down Netlifx. Sprint and/or T-Mobile won't and people will go flocking to them. Just like with when everybody got rid of unlimited data plans. T-Mobile started offering one, then Sprint followed suit and now they all do.

Let us not forget, AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011 but the FCC stopped it. That was BEFORE net neutrality.

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I don't think this can be said enough and I really don't understand how people are so worried about this. Then you have Kyle spreading even more FUD, "at the mercy of the big companies that will control internet access, this write-up at TechCrunch outlines our dystopian future on the internet." are you serious?? Just try to keep your emotions and feelings out of writing articles, otherwise you're no better than Fox or CNN news.

That a company with a thirty-year history of anti-competitive behavior will likely use this greater leverage to behave badly shouldn't have been a particularly hard case to make, suggesting that DOJ lawyers may have flubbed key components of its case. The DOJ sued to thwart the deal last November, and while the agency claimed it was to protect consumers, the incongruity with other Trump administration consumer policies (like, well, everything) have fueled speculation that Trump's disdain for Time Warner owned CNN, or his close relationship with Rupert Murdoch may have colored the DOJ's decision to sue.

It's an indisputable and massive win for AT&T, and the DOJ's first antitrust court loss since 2004. Leon didn't just kill the lawsuit, he didn't offer any conditions to mitigate potential anti-competitive problems, and largely urged the DOJ not to appeal. AT&T, as you might expect, was thrilled with the court's failure to block its latest megamerger:"We are pleased that, after conducting a full and fair trial on the merits, the Court has categorically rejected the government’s lawsuit to block our merger with Time Warner. We thank the Court for its thorough and timely examination of the evidence, and we compliment our colleagues at the Department of Justice on their dedicated representation of the government. We look forward to closing the merger on or before June 20 so we can begin to give consumers video entertainment that is more affordable, mobile, and innovative."

These laws haven't be enforced since Clinton decided to allow merger mania in the 90's to fuel the stock market bubble and keep his favorability rating high. Healthy competition is good for the economy and bad for the stock market. Somehow people get confused those are not the same.

Ironic that one of the former 'Baby Bells' from the AT&T breakup, Southwestern Bell, has pretty much restored the old AT&T company and is now becoming an even larger more diverse company then the old AT&T. SBC bought AT&T in 2005 and kept the AT&T name for the whole operation.

I'm very glad that the rural town I live in has a fantastic ISP. I can get 1 gig if I wanted it; Fiber to the house.
Of all things it is a telephone Co-Op.
Ha!!

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I am in process of completing a move to a rural location. Meeting the phone person tomorrow. They claim I can get 12mb DSL. If so, that will be twice as fast as I could get in the middle of OKC from AT&T before they came through a few months ago and replaced the POTS with fiber. Oddly, the rural location has crap for cell service. Lucky to get 1 bar.

The tech crunch article's accusation of at&t already setting up fast lanes. Click through it's sponsored data. Not fast data, free data. And sponsored data was a thing when net neutrallity was in place. So... yeah this huge abuse of NN going away is something that was ok under NN?

Fucking idiots.

Yes it's a huge merger. We basically jsut got a player slightly different, but in the same league as comcast.

Oddly enough it reduced my access to competitors by exactly ZERO. As long as there's local monopolies enforced by the government, most of this shit is not relevant. Maybe disney can buy verizon and then actually invest in fios expansion or something.

That a company with a thirty-year history of anti-competitive behavior will likely use this greater leverage to behave badly shouldn't have been a particularly hard case to make, suggesting that DOJ lawyers may have flubbed key components of its case. The DOJ sued to thwart the deal last November, and while the agency claimed it was to protect consumers, the incongruity with other Trump administration consumer policies (like, well, everything) have fueled speculation that Trump's disdain for Time Warner owned CNN, or his close relationship with Rupert Murdoch may have colored the DOJ's decision to sue.

It's an indisputable and massive win for AT&T, and the DOJ's first antitrust court loss since 2004. Leon didn't just kill the lawsuit, he didn't offer any conditions to mitigate potential anti-competitive problems, and largely urged the DOJ not to appeal. AT&T, as you might expect, was thrilled with the court's failure to block its latest megamerger:"We are pleased that, after conducting a full and fair trial on the merits, the Court has categorically rejected the government’s lawsuit to block our merger with Time Warner. We thank the Court for its thorough and timely examination of the evidence, and we compliment our colleagues at the Department of Justice on their dedicated representation of the government. We look forward to closing the merger on or before June 20 so we can begin to give consumers video entertainment that is more affordable, mobile, and innovative."
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So help me through this;

On the one hand you have AT&T which is best characterized as a communications provider company, and then you have Time Warner which is almost exclusively a content provider and owner, merging. And so, I am trying to get a good feel for just how this is actually anti-competitive and bad.

I would ask this; If you look at this from the content perspective and the Time Warner acquisition, Time Warner competitors are loosing out how? From the view point of Time Warner's competition, how does AT&T acquiring Time Warner's content hurt them? I don't see how it does.

Now from AT&Ts perspective, does the content acquisition and distribution control of Time Warner's products seriously impact AT&T's competition? This is a maybe at the moment, is it helpful or seriously beneficial to AT&T, certainly, there is a bunch of big named content and AT&T will control it, can keep it for their own distribution if they wish, or simply pull in the bucks for it that Time Warner used to make. But is it anti-competative, is it so powerful that it makes it anti-competitive, everyone will buy AT&T and the competition looses?

I'm not so sure. I'd need real numbers, what's still out there that Time Warner doesn't own, and therefor AT&T didn't acquire. I suppose we are saying that with this situation, something like AT&T could keep HBO to itself and not allow a company like Netflix to run their content and I have to say that I am not sure that this would actually be a reasonable or beneficial play for AT&T.

I know that in the day, the only way to get any HBO was to subscribe to HBO. Today that's not so much the case and I have seen HBO content shopped on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. I guess I have to look at what AT&T gains by withholding content from other outlets in order to dominate in the communications mediums vs what they loose by not selling that content to begin with.

I also have to consider that AT&T may never try to use this content to gain communications market dominance this way, and that while a Judge may not find the acquisition itself anti-competitive, that it doesn't rule out future charges should AT&T adopt these kinds of tactics. In other words, maybe the judge is fine with the purchase, but if AT&T decides to start exclusively fucking their competitors in an anti-competative manner, then the FTC will have a free reign to go after AT&T, and perhaps even break them up.

I guess I'd be wondering what other big communications outfits also own and control content owners/producers.

Imagine your're the largest ISP in the USA and you buy Hulu or whatever. You can turn around and exempt Hulu from your data cap as a 'benefit' to your subscribers, while competitors like Netflix are left out in the cold.

I honestly have no fucking clue why Google, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, and any other big ones didn't all band together and lobby the SHIT out of this. They should have been throwing money at the wall like crazy ... Their stupidity of not doing so will make them pay the price htough looks like.

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Because in the minds of these people, they all benefit. Silicon Valley is NOT the moral highground nor any bastion of free internet. In fact, based on the data and censoring practices lately from Google, Twitter, facebook, and the cash infusion into Netflix from George Soros combined with a distinct political slant that started emerging on Netflix shortly thereafter, Silicon Valley is diametrically opposed to freedom and seeks more and more control.

Look at the merger from that angle rather than $, and you start to see why our Silicon Valley oligarchs didn't oppose it - finances aren't the end goal. Power is. And this helps consolidate power.